Ill Winds

Tomahawks, bunker busters, and dust storms afflict the Iraqi capital.

During the first three days of the bombardment of Baghdad, the explosions came only at night. After that, there was some daylight bombing, but mostly away from the center or on the outskirts of the city. On the sixth day of the attacks, March 25th, another turab, or dust storm, engulfed Baghdad. Yellow dust was mixed with smoke billowing from dozens of oil fires that had supposedly been set to reduce visibility for American and British pilots. The sky turned a blackish purple, as if the city were enduring a nuclear winter. By then, you could hear explosions at all hours of the day and night. Sirens sounded, and about twenty minutes later there would be a short series of noises: big, reverberating, crashing roars that rolled into a gritty rumble. Sometimes the bombs fell nearby, and sometimes it sounded as if they were far away. There must have been a pattern to the bombing, but it wasn’t apparent to me. Thunderclaps seemed to fall randomly on this or that part of the darkened landscape.

The mood in the streets was muted. People seemed to have resigned themselves to their fates, the way people in the Caribbean do before a tropical storm hits. In the beginning, they had been full of nervous energy and were out buying and selling things, making last-minute preparations. Soldiers and gun-toting Mukhabarat agents stood on street corners and next to newly dug trenches. But when the turab came, civilians went indoors, and the soldiers seemed to disappear into the murk. Strong winds whipped the date palms, tore the branches off trees, and rattled shop signs. Most of the stores were shuttered. Downtown, on Sadoun Street, only a few places were open: a couple of cheap and cheerful kebab houses, a pharmacy or two, and, curiously, a luggage shop.

Sunset occurred ahead of time on the twenty-fifth, like a black curtain dropping suddenly, well before 5 p.m. Half an hour later, the curtain ascended briefly and a few fat raindrops fell, turning the dust-caked surfaces of cars muddy. Sirens blared briefly around eleven o’clock, just as a moist fog rolled in. The air smelled curiously like dirt, and it was so dark that even where there were street lights you couldn’t see much beyond a couple of blocks.

Bombs were being dropped somewhere outside the city. We had been told that advance units of the invading force had come within fifty miles of Baghdad, and American B-52s, which had been flying round-the-clock sorties out of England for the past several days, were bombing the Republican Guard forces at the city’s southern perimeter. There was almost no sound at night except for the bombs, and the hum of a generator in a building close by. No people’s voices, no dogs barking. Once or twice, I heard a car’s tires sweep along the wet road outside my window.

I had had a pain in my lower back that morning, and I went to a hospital for some physical therapy. The therapist, a congenial man named Nabil, gave me heat treatments and applied some pulses of electricity. There didn’t seem to be any other patients on the ward. Nabil asked me if I was planning to stay in Baghdad, and when I said yes he laughed and said, “Al Hamdulillah,” which translates, more or less, as “Glory to God,” meaning that one’s fate is out of one’s hands. I had heard the phrase frequently in recent days. Nabil said that he was married and had children. They weren’t taking the new situation very well. “You know how it is,” he said. “Small children don’t understand. For men, it’s O.K. But it’s hard for women and children.” Later, I sat in an office with several doctors, discussing the progress of the war. One of them, a British-trained surgeon, a fastidious man who spoke excellent English, said he’d talked on the telephone with a colleague at a hospital in Basra. The news was bad. British troops were exchanging artillery fire with the city’s defenders, and there were many dead and wounded civilians. “They thought this would be a cakewalk—that’s the American term, isn’t it?—but it has not been,” he said. There was a tone of rebuke in his voice, but he left it at that. Another doctor asked me if I knew what was going to happen, and I said that I didn’t know any more than he did, although it seemed that Iraq’s leader planned to force the Americans and the British to kill so many Iraqi civilians that the war would become untenable and an international outcry would force them to call a halt. The doctors listened and nodded, and an attendant brought us tea.

The next morning, Baghdad was coated in yellow dust. It looked almost as though snow had fallen. The storm had died down a bit, but there was a cold wind and an intermittent drizzle, so the dust became mud, then dust again, in a miserable ritual. People were wearing kaffiyeh head scarfs as masks to cover their mouths and noses. The Iraqi Radio and Television Building, about half a mile away from our hotel, the Palestine, had been bombed that night. Around 3 a.m., another journalist had called my room to see if my television was working. I checked, and there was only white fuzz on the screen. A few hours later, people were huddled in the hotel lobby watching Iraqi news on the television there. An emergency transmitter had apparently been spared in the attack.

I went to the hospital for another back treatment and chatted and drank Turkish coffee with the doctors. At about eleven-thirty, we heard two distinctive short, sharp explosions that seemed to come from a part of the city a couple of miles to the north of us. A few moments later, there was a gust of wind, and a burst of cool air came into the room. “The sandstorm is coming back,” one of the doctors said. I asked him how he knew, and he sniffed the air. “You can smell it,” he said. “It smells like earth.” This had a special significance for him. “Whenever I smell this, it reminds me of dead people,” he said. “Think about it. Think of Iraq’s history. What is that history but thousands of years of wars and killing? This is something we have always done rather well, and a lot of, right back to Sumerian and Babylonian times. Millions of people have died on this earth and become part of it. Their bodies are part of the land, the earth we are breathing.”

At about 2 p.m., I stopped by the press center at the Ministry of Information, an ugly brown concrete building with antennas and anti-aircraft guns on the roof. Journalists were milling around in a confused manner, and then began piling on board a couple of buses. Press-bus trips are usually inspection tours of freshly bombed sites involving civilian casualties. We are never shown damage done to military installations, or to buildings in the Presidential complex. There is little advance warning of these tours, and rarely any information given about the destinations. Minders or ministry officials merely hint about going to see a school or a hospital or a bomb site.

I got on a bus. The turab had resumed with full force, and it was raining. We drove slowly north through the city on the main road leading out of Baghdad toward Kirkuk. Along the way, we passed several oil fires burning in pits dug in the road’s wide median strip. After about twenty minutes, the buses pulled into a working-class neighborhood of grubby apartment buildings with ground-floor workshops in the Al Sha’ab district. A large throng of men and boys had gathered on both sides of the road. Sections of some buildings were scorched, the windows of others were broken, and façades were pitted and blasted. The ground looked shorn, as if a great pair of clippers had come along and taken off the top layer of earth. Twisted strips of aluminum siding lay everywhere. The siren of an approaching police car wailed.

Knots of people were moving in a kind of frenzy of shocked curiosity from one place to another, picking their way with caution through debris. There was a crater in the road where a bomb had hit. The tarmac had been torn outward from it in a striated pattern. A family carried furniture and other belongings out of their apartment in one of the buildings and loaded them onto a small truck. I saw what I thought was a bouquet of white carnations on the sidewalk, but it was a pair of dead chickens. Men stared wordlessly into the ripped-out interiors of workshops, the contents hurled and tossed and twisted about as if by a tornado. A car had been smashed and turned upside down. A group of men stood around one of several completely blackened, carbonized vehicles and began singing and dancing. Some of them held up Kalashnikovs and recited a chant that has become standard at Baghdad’s bombing sites, especially when TV crews arrive: “Long live Saddam, we will sacrifice ourselves for you.” They also shouted epithets against Bush and Blair.

I crossed the boulevard through six lanes of slow-moving traffic. Another bomb had hit the roadside there, leaving a shallow pit. There was a lot of rubble—broken plaster and mortar and more aluminum siding. Two men in their late teens were standing nearby. One of them began dry-heaving. His friend took him by the arm and led him away. A few feet from them a couple of dozen men who had gathered in a circle were looking at something. I pushed my way through the crowd and saw a hand, severed below the knuckles, sitting grotesquely on a green metal window shutter that had fallen on some steps. The hand was thick and gray, and its red-and-white guts, at the messily severed stump, spilled out like electrical circuitry from a cut cable. One young man crouched very close to it, his face just a couple of feet away. He stayed there, staring, for a long time. Someone told me that a man’s brain was sitting on the floor just inside the nearest workshop door, but I didn’t go to look at it.

I walked away and fell into conversation with a pleasant-faced young man who stood by himself on a pile of rubble. He spoke a little English, and he explained that he was a student at the College of Arts at Baghdad University. He was in the English Department, he said, proudly. He asked me where I was from. When I told him the United States, he said, still smiling politely, “Welcome.” We shook hands. He explained that he had not been there when the bombs struck; he had come over from his home, several blocks away. Quite a few people, maybe as many as thirty, he estimated, had died, several of them in their cars. There were a dozen or so destroyed vehicles, on both sides of the street. The dead included an entire family of five, he said, pointing to the scorched-looking apartment directly above us. The bodies had already been taken to the morgue, and the many wounded had been taken to hospitals.

Another man, a little older, approached me. He, too, spoke some English. He told me his name was Muyad, and that he was a “librarian.” I think he meant that he had a store that sold stationery supplies, because he explained that he sold school copybooks and also ran a photocopy machine. He pointed diagonally across the street, to the next block, where he said he lived. I asked him if he knew any of the victims. He nodded yes, and gestured toward one of the blackened cars. A mechanic had been underneath it when it was hit: “His name was Abu Sayaff. He was my friend.” I nodded in sympathy. “Bush and Blair . . . They said this would be a clean war,” Muyad said. He smiled tentatively. “This is not clean. This is dirty—a dirty war.” He was still smiling, and he asked where I was from. “America,” I said. He turned away for an instant, then looked back at me. I told him I was sorry about what had happened. “Don’t be sorry,” he replied. “It’s not the American people. Most of them are against this war. We know this.” And then he added, apparently by way of explanation, “I saw the director Michael Moore on TV yesterday.” He had been watching the Oscar ceremony. Muyad said that he saw a lot of American movies, which was how he had learned to speak English.

We spoke about the war for a few more minutes, exchanging ideas about how it would end, and then we said goodbye. A young man stopped me and pointed to my rear pocket, where I had stuck my notebook, and then up at the sky, indicating the muddy rain. He was trying to tell me that my notes were getting smeared. I thanked him, and he said “Afwan,” which means, more or less, “You’re welcome.”

My room at the Palestine Hotel was prepped for the bombing by a colleague, Paul McGeough, of the Sydney Morning Herald. Paul had been in Baghdad during the bombing in 1991, and so he came prepared. He sent my driver, Sabah, out to buy masking tape, and every glass surface in the room—the mirrors, the television screen, and even the framed prints of a French Impressionist painting and a drawing of old Baghdad—is now covered with great pink Xs. (Sabah could find only pink tape.) The vertical strips and crossbars look uncannily like the Union Jack. The sliding glass doors onto the balcony are plastered with a herringbone pattern of Xs. “If a bomb hits, you won’t get cut to pieces,” Paul said. He took apart the two single beds and placed their bases in an L shape, to provide a protective bulwark between the balcony and the mattresses, which he laid end to end on the floor. I keep my laptop on the desk, permanently connected to a satellite phone. The flat, book-shaped antenna of the satphone sits on a yellow plastic milk crate on a ledge beneath the balcony parapet. It is propped up at the correct angle for the East Atlantic Inmarsat satellite. People on the other side of the building use the Indian Ocean satellite. Everything is held down with pink masking tape.

The Palestine Hotel has, to all intents and purposes, become the public face of the regime, or what remains of it. Since it was assumed that the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry and the Information Ministry would be bombed, very few people remained to take care of business there. Press conferences by senior figures in the government are usually held either at the Palestine or at the Sheraton, which is next door, or sometimes at a small building next to the Information Ministry. One of the most high-profile press conferences in Baghdad was held at the Sheraton on March 24th, the fifth day of the war, by Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister. Aziz’s appearance squelched rumors that he had been killed in the “decapitation” missile strike a few days earlier.

Tariq Aziz is a small man who struts like a bantam cock. He was wearing a military uniform and a beret, and he appeared very cheerful and confident. He sat at a table on a raised platform, in front of a large, gilt-framed portrait of Saddam Hussein. An unshaved bodyguard wearing a kaffiyeh scarf around his neck stood under the portrait, and there were several other bodyguards standing on the floor below the table. Aziz made the usual claims about the motives of the United States and Great Britain and noted that America had been hijacked by a small group of Jews and Christians, the oil lobby, and the military-industrial complex. He gloated about the fight the Iraqis were putting up, and about the Bush Administration’s apparent miscalculations regarding strategy. “The Iraqi people are united under Saddam Hussein and the Arab Baath Socialist Party,” he said. “We’ve been leading this country for decades.”

An air-raid siren started up, but Aziz ignored it, and told the story of the peasant who had allegedly brought down an Apache helicopter gunship with an ancient rifle. “With his old Czech brno gun—made before the time of Havel and the others—he used it to welcome the Americans,” Aziz said. “Not with music, not with flowers. He had no instruments, just the gun, and he used it in the best Iraqi way, to welcome the invaders.”A reporter asked Aziz how the regime intended to defend Baghdad. “Stay in Baghdad and you’ll see,” he replied, and got up to leave. We were locked in the room for several minutes so that we couldn’t see which way he went.

The turab died down during the night following the Al Sha’ab bombing, and the next day was crisp and bright. Baghdad was still covered with pale-yellow dust, but already, here and there, people had emerged to clean up, throwing pails of water over their cars, their shop fronts, and the sidewalks outside their homes. Downtown, some businesses reopened, and traffic and people were once again on the streets. But, with the majority of the shopkeepers and their families having evacuated to outlying villages or towns even farther away, most of Baghdad’s commerce consisted of farmers selling produce on the sidewalks. Men stood behind piles of freshly harvested onions, lettuce, beetroot, potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes, grown in the welter of patchy gardens that are visible in vacant lots and the odd tilled field all over the city.

Rural life persists tenaciously in the heart of Baghdad. Vegetables are grown a block away from the Ministry of Information, and, somewhere very near the Palestine Hotel, there is a donkey who brays loudly several times a day. In the early hours of the morning, I hear roosters crowing. Baghdad is big and sprawling and not really “urban” in the conventional sense, except for the downtown area. There are a few ten-to-twenty-story ministry buildings and hotels, such as the Palestine and the Sheraton, on Abu Nawas Street, but most of Baghdad consists of low, single-family town houses and stumpy three-to-five-story apartment blocks.

Most of the city’s big buildings, such as Saddam’s two great mosques, which are still under construction, and his grandiose palaces and monuments to war and to himself, lie to the west of the Tigris, and a good many of those have been transformed into ruined hulks. Many bombed buildings have caved in on themselves, with wreckage spilling out onto the streets or with their insides torn to shreds but the basic structure intact. The Al Rashid Hotel was still standing at the end of last week, for instance, but, right next to it, a small building that I was told had been a police computer center had been entirely flattened, its concrete slabs crunched down onto one another like a sandwich. Across the street, another large building, which supposedly housed a department of the secret police, had been hit. It had been disembowelled by warheads that entered it through the roof. Several apartment blocks just next to it were practically untouched: their sides were lightly sprayed by the dust of the explosion, and they were missing a few windowpanes.

The people of Baghdad adapted to the new reality of war, which consisted of the steady bombing of buildings associated with Saddam Hussein and his power, but not, by and large, with themselves—although the Al Sha’ab bombing was a foretaste, most people believed, of what was to come, and their trepidation was confirmed two days later, when another bombing caused even more civilian casualties. The news that the invasion was slowing down, and the reappearance of Saddam and Tariq Aziz and their defiant promises to bloody the American and British invaders when they arrived in Baghdad, indicated that there would be a prolonged siege.

The day after the Al Sha’ab bombing, I saw two large explosions in the distance, near Saddam’s ornate Sajida Palace—with the four huge bronze busts of Saddam wearing Saladin’s helmet—which was already partly destroyed. Moments earlier, Sabah had gone off in that direction to find us some food; when he returned, about an hour later, he said he had been driving near the palace when the bombs hit, and the concussion had made his car leap several centimetres off the road. Not long afterward, Paul McGeough, who was in a room facing south, saw what looked like a heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile shoot out of the neighborhood next to us and twirl into the sky.

In the afternoon, a bomb hit the big Al Doura fuel depot in the southern suburbs. That evening, many more bombs were dropped, including one that hit a building in the Presidential complex across from our balcony. Not many people in Baghdad slept well that night. The bombs continued to fall all over the city until just after dawn, when there was a phenomenal explosion that rocked buildings downtown, including the Palestine. “Bunker busters” and missiles had hit communications facilities. We went to inspect the Al Alwiya telephone exchange, about three blocks from the hotel. Viewed from the front, the building appeared to be untouched. But at the back there was a great hole where it had been ripped open; several of its floors were exposed, and their contents had spilled onto the street. The bomb had penetrated into its bowels, carving a pit some thirty feet down and creating a slagheap of broken masonry and twisted metal. A persistent ringing noise that seemed familiar came from somewhere deep inside. It took a moment or two to realize that it sounded like a disconnected telephone, but much, much louder. It was as if a hundred phones had been left off their hooks. ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.